You’ve got to hand it to the undead.  No sooner do you think that films about vampires and zombies have run their course, than a film appears with a unique angle on what it is to be a vampire.  On this occasion, the film is Let The Right One In, a Swedish story that weaves its charms with the depiction of the relationship between a young boy, Oskar, and his undead neighbour Eli, a pale girl who has been 12 for quite some years.

Unlike the lavish visual spectacle that vampire films often aspire to, this one is conceived in naturalistic muted tones, with blood red being the most vibrant colour.  And that works thematically too.  Young Oskar’s life is typical of that of a young Stockholm kid, the biggest drama in his world the fact that he’s being bullied at school.  Pretty soon though, he realises that new pal Eli is a vampire, and it’s this connection that starts to turn things round for them both, leading to Oskar to turn the tables round on his tormentor by whapping him round the head with a pole.  And that choice sets other motions in action, the consequence of which provides the film with its grisly climax.

To begin with, Eli sources blood through a hapless serial killer.  But he messes up once too often, and Eli is left to fend for herself.  Only, by now she’s already embarked on a tender romance of sorts with Oskar, who inevitably becomes involved with supporting her alternative lifestyle.  In less sensitive hands, this would be Juno meets Lost Boys, but director Tomas Alfredson makes choices according to a different rhythm — as much as anything, this is an elegaic tale of first love.

But yes, it’s also a vampire film, and has to establish exactly what genre conventions it will follow, and which it will cast aside.  Obviously the notion that you have to invite a vampire into your home is one of those choices, there in the title where it’s as much to do with letting someone into your heart.  But there’s also the business of what vulnerabilities vampires have, and it’s here that the film makes an unfortunate misstep.

Eli’s first victim in the story has a group of misfit friends, and the story follows what happens to them.  That includes another of their number being snacked on by Eli, and her subsequent stay in hospital.  As far as I can figure, the only purpose of this sequence is to demonstrate what happens when a vampire is exposed to sunlight, which the victim does gloriously when she explodes into flames.  Only, she’d already been seen smouldering at an earlier point, so I’m really not sure what the purpose of that digression was, other than to double underline the need for Eli to be kept by Oskar in a box when they’re travelling away on a train at the film’s conclusion.

It’s possible that the business about spontaneous vampire combustion makes more sense in the novel, by John Ajvide Lindquist, who is also responsible for the screenplay.  At any rate, it strikes the only false and redundant note in an otherwise skilfully written script.  And it underlines a distinction between scripts and prose: the digressions possible in the latter will be clearer by the time they reach the screen, since they create impatience in the audience.  Especially when the story has already gone a long way down its track, you don’t want to be led a merry dance that takes you somewhere else for no good reason.

Let The Right One In is a sweetly morbid film about getting by and fitting in and finding someone who’ll help you do all of that and more.  It’s a welcome addition to vampire lore, and its Scandinavian origins get me excited about what might happen if a distinctly Australian, Korean, or French vampire film were to join the canon…if you’re aware of any such, from those or other countries, please let me know.